Home maintenance services

Home maintenance and facilities services run on work orders, jobs, and operatives. In the UK, you're often covering housing associations, landlords, or contracted facilities—reactive repairs, planned maintenance, and inspections. When work orders land in email and spreadsheets, routing is ad hoc, and handover to the field is informal, jobs slip and residents notice.

The operational reality in this sector

Teams take work orders from portals, email, phone, and sometimes mobile apps. The office triages, assigns to an operative or contractor, and hands over scope, access, and priority. Progress is tracked in job software, spreadsheets, or both—but intake and handover can live in inboxes and forwarding. Handover to the van is often a printout, a PDF, or a quick call. The operational reality is reactive triage, unclear ownership, and "did we close that job?" when volume spikes.

Common friction we see

• Work orders land in multiple inboxes and portals; no single intake or triage view.
• Job allocation is ad hoc—who's local, who's free—with no clear ownership or SLA.
• Handover to operatives is verbal or via scraps; scope, access, and priority get lost.
• Status lives across job software, spreadsheets, and email; reconciliation is manual.
• Too much time on "who's got this?" and "have we updated the resident?"
• Residents chase for updates because internal ownership is unclear.

What this looks like in practice

A typical home maintenance team has work orders from a client portal, email, and phone. The office logs them in a spreadsheet or job system and assigns in a morning meeting or by broadcast. Operatives get a job sheet—sometimes printed, sometimes emailed—with address and brief scope. Access details and updates arrive by phone or WhatsApp. When it gets busy, jobs queue, handover blurs, and the team works overtime to clear the backlog. Residents complain when nobody turns up or when updates are scarce.

How we typically approach this

We start with discovery: we map how work orders come in, how they're triaged and allocated, and how handover to the field works. We design workflows—intake, triage, allocation, handover—that fit your setup and integrate with your job or facilities software. We build or configure so work orders land in one place, ownership is clear, and handover is documented. We train your team and support go-live. You run it yourselves after that.

What changes after implementation

• One place for work orders; clear triage and ownership.
• Allocation and handover tracked consistently; fewer missed jobs.
• Clear handover to operatives—scope, access, priority—so they show up prepared.
• A single view of what's open and what's at risk.
• Less chase-up, better communication with residents.

Tools we commonly work with

We work with what you use: job management (e.g. Fixflo, Mobysoft, similar), housing or facilities portals, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Xero, and form or intake tools. We connect work order intake, workflows, and handover so you're not rekeying or chasing across systems.

A short example from the field

Illustrative example. A home maintenance contractor had work orders from a housing association portal and email. The office logged them in a spreadsheet and assigned by availability. Handover to operatives was a printed job sheet and a phone call. We built a single intake pipeline, clear triage and allocation, and simple handover checklists that fed into their job system. The office could see every open job and its owner; operatives had clear scope and access. Job completion improved and fewer residents chased for updates.

FAQs

We use job management software. Do we need to change?
Usually no. We integrate with what you have. The gap we fill is often work order intake, routing, and handover—so requests land in one place and flow into your job system instead of living in email.

Our operatives are out on the road. How do they stay in the loop?
We design so the office has one view and handover to the field is clear. We can work with your existing job sheets, apps, or comms—we're not forcing new devices on anyone.

What about reactive vs planned maintenance?
We can design for both. Intake and handover often share a pipeline; we'll map your actual flows—reactive, planned, and inspect—and build to that.

Next step

If work order intake and handover are holding you back, we can help you capture every job, route clearly, and hand over to the field without the chaos. View our services or see how we work.